Post navigation

We’ve got a number of beers planned for the future and all of them include using sour, aged beer and blending with fruits. In order to have enough of this base beer, we need to brew and age quite a bit. To get started, we’re brewing up 13 gallons, max for the current system and get things aging while we wait for the various fruit seasons to occur.

Nothing special here, just my take on the base beer that Jester King uses for their fruited sours. Enjoy!

Mash

Download

Quite a departure from what we normally do but my good friend Mark Hamzy has been playing with using Jester King’s mixed culture in many places, including making hot sauce! Mark shared with me his first small batch and it was a resounding success. Full of hatch and smokey flavor, noticeable sour bite; oh and hot! Mark asked me, how can we make it bigger this time?

Why not do 5 gallons and age it in a whiskey barrel? Neither of us had done this before and we didn’t exactly have a recipe. Our best guess was to come up with a ratio of hatch roasted chilis to beer and yeast. We brewed up a smoked-malt base beer, about 4 gallons, unhopped and targeting 1.040. While the wort was boiling we worked on de-skinning and blending up roughly two cases of freshly roasted hatch chilis.

After we’d collected enough chili we would mix in a couple ounces of fresh wort, some of the mixed culture and then pour into the barrel via a funnel. We’ll age this combination for many months, checking on it as we go, topping it off with both fresh mixed culture and wort to ensure we get it sour enough.

Now that the Battle Shed is up, it’s time to brew a beer and ferment it within with only ambient temperate to control it. I’ve had three beers age in one of my 5 gallon Balcones Whiskey barrel and have been waiting to have the shed ready to bottle the previous batch (Quad Damage) and then brew and prepare a Boxer’s Revenge inspired clone.

I brewed a test-batch earlier this year and the Boxer’s clone came out very nice. Slightly under carbed due to testing out new bottling method (pre-packaging yeast in gelatin caps) which worked well but needed a bit more sugar to get the right level. The taste and aroma were spot on. The only real concern was that it needed quite a bit more oak to make it more like Boxer’s. For this batch I’ll ferment it and again it entirely in the oak barrel.

Nothing special in the recipe besides using the Jester King mixed culture. Note: Mash @ 150F for 75 minutes. Enjoy!

Download

Capturing some local microflora with apple juice. Two types of wild flowers and a control. Left out overnight in the Texas winter, now incubating at 75F.

Along side Jester King as one of my favorite breweries is Prairie Artisan Ales. They’ve been churning out great beer after beer. Prairie is always experimenting and playing with bold flavors while mixing in healthy amounts of barrel aging. One of their earlier beers captured my attention. Funky Galaxy. When fresh, this beer delivers this amazing CDA/Black IPA punch, but with a light farmhouse funk in the nose, but enough citrus and tropical fruits that it drinks really easy.

Here’s the fun part: if you sit on this one for a few months the Brett transforms the beer dramatically. Much of the hop aroma fades and/or is consumed by the Brett and produces one of the *funkiest* Brett B beers I’ve ever had. Comparing a freshly bottled beer side-by-side to an aged one makes one wonder if these were even the same beer at all.

This one has been on my list for some time but never got to brew it. I’ve had some really good success with using Jester King mixed culture yeast and bacteria. The Boxer’s Revenge inspired one gallon batch is already amazing at two months, only needed a little more oak character before bottling. This recipe has about 30 IBU so I know that the JK yeast will send plenty of sour punch with this recipe. Mixing that with the roast and citrus hops should make for a very tasty brew.

The origin of the malt bill was inspired from Hops and Grain’s Dark IPA that they brewed a few years back that I really enjoyed. I picked that back up here and bumped the gravity up to match the 8% of Funky Galaxy, and switched the hops to Galaxy and Citra for a really nice citrus/tropical fruit nose. Looking forward to brewing a bigger batch on the full-scale equipment as well.

About a year ago, I brewed my first lambic-style beer. I didn’t spend the time to do a turbid mash, but I did use the Wyeast guide for temperature infusions to provide a similar mash profile. During the past year, I’ve pulled a few samples, roughly once a quarter to ensure that the beer didn’t turn too acetic. Frankly, I’m impressed at how well it’s held up. This is almost entirely due to applying a layer of paraffin wax to the entire barrel. At this point, the year old beer is exceedingly sour, about 3.0 pH. It tastes full of lemon zest, sour grapefruit, medium oak, with just a hint of vanilla whiskey, due to the use of a whiskey barrel. Clearly not as neutral as the Lambic I’ve tasted from Cantillon, Boon, and Drie Frontain. Nonetheless, it’s entirely acceptable for a year old sour to be tasting this well.

For this year’s attempt, I’ve prepared a Rum Whiskey barrel. It’s had only two beers run through it, but it’s aged beer for nearly a year. It’s likely that there will be more barrel flavor contributed than the previous barrel, but that’ll be fun when blending.

Hot water rinsing. Filled and drained completely three times with 150F water. Soaked both heads as well.

Steam-sanitizing the barrel. I used the guide on Embrace the Funk to construct a barrel steamer from a pressure cooker and a few extras. This hits 212F and stays going for 15 minutes.

After cleaning, I used a heat gun to melt a block of paraffin wax. This took about 20 minutes. Much faster than double-boiler and basting it on.

The recipe for this year will remain the same. The only major difference is the use of aged hops versus a small amount of very low AA hops. Last year I used Crystal @ 3 AA. This year I used two year old whole-leaf hops. Originally they were about 10% AA, but being old and exposed they provide a much lighter hopping and hopefully a bit more musty, cheesy funk one expects from great Lambic beer.

Mash

Notes

After mash-out, drain all liquid into boil kettle, raise temp to 190, pump back to mash for second rinse through grain bed.

Pitching ECY20 Bugcountry in 11G barrel.

Brewed 2015-01-30- Mash pH was at 5.1, a little low- A little short on the sparge water; had extra but didn't get it into the mash tun. Ended up with 16G pre-boil, about .5 gallon short. Upside, pre-boil gravity was up, 1.048.- 90 minute boil completed fine, ended up at 13.5G of 1.057 wort.- Chilled with ground water (about 60F), directly into barrel at 70F- Extra 5L of wort into EL flask, parked next to barrel for some "spontaneous" action- Aerated barrel for 60 seconds with O2- Pitched half ECY20 from Sept, and Half ECY20 from Dec- 24 hours till active foaming fermentation. Ambient temp in garage about 60 to 70F. Much warmer than last year, no need for heat belt to keep temps above 50.- 5 days until 5L flask "caught" enough blow-off yeast and outside air; then full active fermentation. Smells very belgium-like.